What's mainly been on my mind is that while past performance is of course not an indication of future performance, the likes of the Prisma5 fund has similar enough performance to investing in an S&P500 index - is it worth the time and effort trying to get yourself a balanced portfolio of indices or let these guys do it for you inside the Prisma fund?
Not quite sure I understand what you mean here sorry. My understanding is the AMC they are referring to there is the one applied by your broker to manage your pension, so say 1% execution-only with the likes of LABrokers, or 1.25% with other managed pension providers. So if you're paying ~1% AMC to a broker for a pension invested in the Prisma funds, or ~1% AMC for access to a Davy Select where you buy ETFs, then you can make a crude comparison between the returns from Prisma vs the ETFs."The fund performance shown is before the full AMC is applied on your policy." So in reality you have no way of knowing how well this fund is actually performing....
Yes sorry, I was just using S&P500 as an example of an index there. You'd want to be looking much broader than that in your Davy Select.Also trying to compare it to the S&P 500 is pointless, since it is not trying to replicate that performance profile. You would need to compare it to some type of composite benchmark to even begin to get a feel for how well it is done...
I actually don't mind spending time on it, as I mentioned back in my original post, I've always been very interesting in stock-market investing and until recently spent a huge amount of time researching and investing in shares, ETFs etc. What I would hate to do though is spend a lot of time balancing my portfolio etc. and paying similar fees to letting a professional do it inside one of these managed funds, and end up with a similar return. To be clear though, the advice to put my pension into the Prisma funds came from a respectable and well known financial advisory firm after spending significant time looking at my finances, answering my 1000 questionsI understand your desire not to spend much time on this, but honestly handing over your money to someone in a situation where you have very little supervisor indicators is not a great move.
invest it yourself and don't pay anyone apart from the platform and the inland revenue. Figure out what is the most effective ETF's (and funds) that suit you and that provide maximum diversification. Then decide your allocation according to your risk profile.
Playing the devil's advocate here for a moment - "Keep it simple" and "Figure out what is the most effective ETF's (and funds) that suit you and that provide maximum diversification. Then decide your allocation according to your risk profile" are not really compatible statements. "Keep it simple", the advice the financial adviser also gave, to me would imply choosing your risk profile, then let the professionals (Zurich in this case) match that to appropriate indices, shares, geographies to find appropriate diversification, risk management etc.Keep it simple s
This is the crux of this thread though; I'm not looking for general investment advice (though if I were, I'd 100% agree with your KISS strategy above). It's in the Pension sub-forum because as a company owner, an EPP is a very tax efficient way of withdrawing funds from the company. So then it's a matter of what pension vehicles are out there and how they stack up against each other, specifically as pension investments, not compared to investing post-tax income where things like AMCs aren't applied to everything.Get a pension if you can take advantage of employer contributions and in my opinion there is zero point in giving any of the people you mention your money.
Another member PM'd me pointing out that you can actually deal with Zurich directly for pensions, at a significantly lower AMC than going through a broker. Obviously you don't have the benefit of being able to ask the broker questions over the years, but if you'd prefer to pay for this advice on a per-incident basis, or for whatever reason you feel you know enough to proceed without it, this seems like a good option.
So an Executive Pension with Zurich Insurance -
- Allocation rate: 100%
- AMC: 0.75% (0.4% is deducted in the price declared (declared unit price is the bid price after this 0.4% deduction) and 0.35% is deducted by way of cancellation of units)
- €3.50 per month policy fee
- Zurich will act as the trustee free of charge
- Early encashment penalties up to year five
- Four free fund switches per year
- You can take or leave their life-styling (moving from the shares to bonds/cash as you approach retirement)
- You can choose from Zurich's 30-40 funds. They're all managed by the looks of it, and you cannot buy individual shares or ETFs like you could in say Davy Select, but plenty of choice in index funds if that's what you want.
I decided to set one of these up to begin building a pension fund, always have the option to move it to a Davy Select type trading platform or self-administered pension at some point in the future anyway.
Hope that's useful info and thanks to the member who PM'd me!
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